Space Babies » rants

Unlocking education, for growth without limits

joost — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:05:48 +0000

Recently a new movement has sprang up in the Netherlands pushing education towards Open Source. In education, proprietary software is the norm. I think that’s bad since this locks children into using a particular vendor’s software basically for ever. Unlocking Education aims to change this and I fully support their work.

They want to enable all citizens to have free access to education and all other publicly-funded institutions, both online and offline, by pushing for a mandatory use of Open Standards and a guaranteed platform-independent access to all online environments. This allows students and parents to use Free Software, and in that way being able to tap into their potential for growth and personal development.

To me it’s a no-brainer but apparently the minister is not supportive of the idea. This is the same minister that is telling us parents to ‘spend more time with our children, discussing, tutoring, helping out at school’ while she spent zero time on her own children, and had a fucking nanny doing that. I have to wonder how lying thugs like that can come to rule us. Oh wait, politics.

A few sane members of parliament are pushing back, but I think that’s not enough. A to-do list has been published, and I will cross off a few items of my own. If you can help, please consider it!

DigiNotar’s criminal negligence

joost — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:54:04 +0000

You might have heard about DigiNotar, a Dutch company (owned by Vasco Data Security) that sold security (SSL) certificates used on the internet. They were hacked in a big way. They were so hacked, that all their certificates are now declared un-safe everywhere in the world.

How did this happen?

Dutch security firm Fox-IT investigated and the results are shocking. Since this news is mostly in Dutch I might do you a favor by translating:

DigiNotar noticed “something wrong” on 19 July 2011 but did nothing
DigiNotar detected actual use of hacked certificates on 28 July 2011 but did nothing
They saw this traffic coming mostly from Iran. And did nothing.
The certificate signing infrastructure was accessible from the network (!)
Anyone, yes even regular users without security clearance, had access to the signing infrastructure (!!)
Our government’s SSL infrastructure was also available in this fashion (contrary to every agreement made)
No anti-virus software anywhere. And of course they’re a Windows shop
No intrusion detection at all
No paper-trail logging in place
Easy to guess passwords were used by administrators
Copies of certificates were stored. Copies! Were stored! By DigiNotar!! On a non-secure LAN! OMFG

This has nothing to do with sloppiness. DigiNotar and it’s parent company Vasco Data Security have been criminally negligent and should be prosecuted. Luckily, the State’s Attorney has opened an investigation.

Mentally challenged Citigroup

joost — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:33:13 +0000

The security of 200.000 Citigroup customers was compromised recently. But not as part of an elaborate hack or phishing expedition. Citigroup allowed anyone to get everyone else’s customer information by simply changing URLs. No security was in place, at all.

This is a serious problem and criminally negligent of Citigroup. They have no locks to protect you as a customer; instead they leave everything wide open for everyone to grab. Wtf?

I like this quote on Slashdot:

I would not even prosecute the group. Seriously…. for what? Walking into a bakery where a mentally challenged person was just freely giving away cherry pies?

Fixing MySQL encoding issues with Ruby 1.9.2

joost — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:53:46 +0000

There have been tens, hundreds, thousands blogs posts related to Latin1/UTF8 encoding issues. So here is yet another, this time related to upgrading from Ruby 1.8.6 + mysql gem to Ruby 1.9.2 + mysql2 gem.Here’s the thing: ever since Rails 2.1 I was under the assumption that all strings in my app were UTF-8 throughout. Wrong. Depending on your database settings, HTML HEAD, database driver and Ruby version you might will have a mix of character sets. Jay!

A recent upgrade of www.zappelin.nl brought this to light:

utf-8 present in HTML HEAD;
generated Rails app with all utf-8 defaults present;
mysql database still had latin1 as default character set;
same for the table;
using the old mysql driver gem.

The above combination led to strings still being stored as latin1 in the database.

MySQL documentation mentions charset conversions using ALTER TABLE. These did not work — the offending characters remained in their original character set. In the MySQL console these were printed fine: for instance ë was visible in the correct places. However in the Ruby world this was displayed as Ã«. Wuh?

I briefly considered dropping down to unix and using iconv on the database dump.

Luckily I was just too lazy today. Turns out you can convert the offending column to BLOB first and then to the correct character set. This worked! So if you have this problem the query below might fix things.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MODIFY col1 BLOB;

ALTER TABLE tbl_name MODIFY col1 VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8;

However, it still needed a bit of magic with regards to the default charset on the table. My best combination was to first convert the entire table to use latin1 by default, then run the conversion, then set the default to utf8. However, this didn’t work always.

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET latin1;

Keep in mind to always use the mysql2 gem when running under Ruby 1.9.2. Anything else is rubbish since this will not know how to deal with UTF-8 and you app will break and you will cry.

My wish for 2011: a definitive end to character set issues plz. This really is no fun.

Office Mac 2011: incompetence nor malice

joost — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:20:19 +0000

I have played with Office for Mac 2011 lately and noticed one of my personal annoyances still present. I am talking about the Microsoft User Data folder inside ~/Documents.

This annoys the heck out of me because ~/Documents is for …. well Documents and not for Application Support. There’s ~/Library for that; MacBU use it damn it! But then I Googled a bit since this misfeature has been in Mac Office for so long. Turns out there’s actually a sane decision behind it:

Yes. We tried to move the db to somewhere in ~/Library, but Spotlight explicitly ignores everything under there except for ~/Library/Mail (hmmm, I wonder why…!?) and Spotlight support was a must-have feature. We’re working with Apple to get OS changes so that we can have Spotlight support for some location inside ~/Library be officially supported.

I get it and it makes sense to me now. Hope Apple can fix this pretty soon. There’s a boatload of Adobe crap in ~/Documents as well (although I have no hopes of them ever fixing their stuff).

Diaspora released

joost — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:16:00 +0000

I am not a big fan of Facebook. As a matter of fact, I think people who post their entire private life will pay a price some time in the future. Think about it. A private for profit corporation owns details about your life. Owns it. You have given Facebook an irrevocable right to do whatever they want. Doesn’t that scare you? It should. But, in true intartubes-fashion, an alternative is being developed. It’s called Diaspora. It will be open source. Nobody will actually own it. Now to me that sounds like a sane idea. In fact, since the code is hosted on Github, I will probably contribute as well. I might even join. And best of all? It’s built in Rails.

AT&T hates customers

joost — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:43:58 +0000

In my series “corporations are amoral” here is a new installment. It’s all over teh interwebs that an AT&T customer emailed the AT&T CEO and was “thanked” by …. legal action! Wow, great customer relations there! Woohoo!

Contrast this to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, who actually responds to email when you send one.

I heart git

joost — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:56:33 +0000

You only appreciate fast version control when you’re on a slow link. Thank you Linus for creating git, I would have gone insane without it today!

PS – posts about RailsWayCon2010 presentations coming up!

Apple pulls sexual content from iTunes

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:44:52 +0000

Apple, as puritan as any US company, has pulled all sexual apps from the iTunes store after “complaints”. Mysteriously, all the violent games remain. A MacRumors reader put it very succinctly:

So boobs are bad, but murdering cops is ok. Got it.

Mind you, these apps are all rated for 18+. So you have to wonder how these complaints even are possible. If you are a concerned parent pull the rating-switch on your child’s iPhone!

Nederlandse Spoorwegen makes customers hate them

joost — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:53:01 +0000

Strong words? Yes, indeed. Though I have the SMTP-headers to prove the fact that NS (Dutch Railways) actively hates their customers and wants to annoy them as much as possible. Case in point: e-mail newsletter.

When I registered with them (compulsary to receive a discount card. topic for another rant) I had to leave my e-mail address to “verify who I am”. Well, whatever. I registered and made sure to uncheck all the “sell my private information to advertisers” and “bother me with newsletters” boxes.

Yet what is happening? I keep receiving their stupid newsletters. What is worse, they have made it impossible to unsubscribe. Here is what I have tried:

click the unsubcribe link

Actually it’s not an unsubscribe link. The link leads to their general customer service page, after which I should login manually and navigate through their system to find the unsubscribe box. Bad! Give me a perishable token in the email for a one-click unsubscription.

uncheck the newsletter box

No shit Sherlock. I had this one unchecked of course. Un-checked it again just to make sure. Had no effect, I still keep getting email from them.

reply to the email

My opinion is: if you send out newsletters, make sure people can reply. Otherwise you are just shouting with your hands over your ears. In other words when you disallow responses through the very medium you are using, you are abusive and anti social. Yet this is what Nederlandse Spoorwegen is. A reply leads to an Undeliverable Message.

adhere to internet protocol

Even if you don’t care about your customer, when you are on the Internet you must follow the internet protocols. The bounce message from the last paragraph was sent from postmaster@ns.nl. But when I send mail to that address, the message bounces as well! This is a huge no-no and it makes them spammers by every definition out there. Having a valid postmaster address is specifically mandatory per RFC.

file a complaint

So I went to www.ns.nl and looked around to see where I could leave a complaint. Turns out I can’t!!! I can only call them, via a paid 0900 number which means I have to pay them to get my email address of their spam lists! Maybe it’s just me but I find this kind of behaviour absurd. Fucking idiots. I hate them.

result: spamklacht

Luckily the Dutch government has forbidden spamming and has opened www.spamklacht.nl. I am unsure if my little submission has any effect, but at least it’s something I can do.